Nick Clarke
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3692902 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nick Clarke |
| NOMBRES | Nick |
| APELLIDO | Clarke |
| FIRMA | CLARKE N |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9148-9849 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 832 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Mass Observing British politics
The current political moment in Britain is characterised by disaffection, affective polarisation, and populist mobilisation of these (dis)affections. How best to research these moody times? We argue that political studies could utilise Mass Observation (MO) more than it has done. An independent research organisation, MO has collected observations, diaries, and responses to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions and tasks – from across the UK…
Right place, right time
On 12th May 2020, Mass Observation collected c5,000 diaries from people across the UK. Many of these diaries mention luck, and many of these luck stories are geography stories. Geographers, though, have not written much about luck. In this article, I review the literature on luck from within and beyond geography to construct a working definition and geographical approach to luck. The working definition describes luck as chance, fortuitous, unexpe…
The Good Politician
We explore the characteristics of politicians that make them trusted by citizens, fielding conjoint survey experiments in seven democracies. Studies regularly indicate that competence and integrity are key attributes in the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, but we show that displaying authenticity is also important. Authenticity is about being true to oneself, and in the political context this requires politicians to appear unlike typical…
Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic
How will the COVID-19 pandemic be remembered? What did it mean to people? How did it feel? This book provides an unprecedented account of the pandemic as it was experienced in the UK. Everyday Life in the COVID-19 Pandemic is a democratic history based on the 5,000 diaries collected by Mass Observation on 12 May 2020. It is a record of what many of these diarists wrote, from a wide range of positions, in a variety of voices and on a wealth of dif…
Working through ‘working through’
This commentary provides a summary of Shawn Bodden's intervention, before raising three questions prompted by the article. What is the relationship between a more ordinary critical geography and interpretivism? How is ‘ordinariness’ being used by geographers as a category of geographical analysis? And what might a more ordinary critical geography resemble in practice
Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against Covid-19
Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive's COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people…
Archiving the Covid-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown
The COVID-19 pandemic generated debates about how pandemics should be known. There was much discussion of what role the human sciences could play in knowing - and governing - the pandemic. In this article, we focus on attempts to know the pandemic through diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. In particular, we focus on the archiving of such forms by Mass Observation in the UK and the Everyday Life in Middle…
Voter Decision-Making in a Context of Low Political Trust
Using volunteer writing for Mass Observation, we explore how British citizens decided whether to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum was the biggest decision made by the British electorate in decades, but involved limited voter analysis. Many citizens did not have strong views about EU membership in early 2016. The campaigns did not help to firm up their views, not least because so much information appeared to be in dispute. Voters, often character…
Urban-rural mobilities
Beyond compliance
In the UK, discussion of good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic largely focused on compliance and non‐compliance with government rules. In this paper, we offer an alternative point of focus. Pandemic governance proceeded not only through rules/morality, but also through freedom/ethics. Good citizenship, therefore, involved practical reasoning in response to situations. We demonstrate this using diaries and other forms of writing collected …
A folk theory of the EEC
The 2016 EU Referendum has renewed the focus of historians and social scientists on Britain’s historical relationship with Europe as they aim to develop a better understanding of ‘the road to Brexit’. The development of Euroscepticism in Britain has often been approached from an elite perspective, with a focus on the conflicting ideas and arguments between politicians, political parties, and the media. This article builds on existing studies by f…
Popular imaginative geographies and Brexit
The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it. This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens’ demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their localities/regions, or elite discourses. It bu…
The Good Politician and Political Trust
There are three broad sets of qualities that citizens might expect politicians to display: competence, integrity and authenticity. To be authentic, a politician must be judged to be in touch with the lives and outlooks of ordinary people and previous research has suggested that this expectation has grown more prevalent in recent times. In this article, we use survey evidence from Britain – from citizens, parliamentarians and journalists – to expl…
Four Modes of Neighbourhood Governance
In a context of global moves towards decentralization and neighbourhood governance, this article focuses on neighbourhood governance in Nanjing, China. We draw on interviews and observations in 32 neighbourhoods to examine how neighbourhood governance plays out in different neighbourhoods. We identify and describe four modes of governance-collective consumption, service privatization, civic provision and state-sponsored-to argue that neighbourhoo…
The Good Politician
Surveys show a lack of trust in political actors and institutions across much of the democratic world. Populist politicians and parties attempt to capitalise on this political disaffection. Commentators worry about our current 'age of anti-politics'. Focusing on the United Kingdom, using responses to public opinion surveys alongside diaries and letters collected by Mass Observation, this book takes a long view of anti-politics going back to the 1…
The Decline in Diffuse Support for National Politics
This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are confined to using either survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioral measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long view on political disaffection. We first consider time-series data available from repeated survey measur…
Changing spaces of political encounter and the rise of anti-politics
Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General Election diaries. Since diarists wrote mostly about politicians, political campaigns, and associate…
Golden age, apathy or stealth? Democratic engagement in Britain, 1945–1950
This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and…
Geographies of politics and anti-politics
Locality and localism
This paper considers the political geography of localism and reviews the insights of geographers regarding localism and locality. It identifies three main approaches to locality in Human Geography. Regional geographers, humanistic geographers and spatial scientists view localities as relatively natural phenomena. Marxist and political-economic geographers view localities as social phenomena produced by uneven capitalist development. Post-structur…
Problematising practices
Authors' response to reviews of Globalising Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption (Wiley-Blackwell)
Geographies and politics of localism
Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism
There is a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among human geographers. There is also a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among urban policy practitioners. This latter "new comparative urbanism" is identified in the paper as "actually existing comparative urbanism" and outlined using existing literatures on municipal internationalism and urban policy mobilities, in addition to empirical material from a research project on interurban p…
Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement
This paper brings geographical research on urban policy mobility into conversation with historical research on the transnational municipal movement. It argues that much of conceptual and methodological interest can be found in this second literature, especially in Pierre-Yves Saunier’s research on the ‘Urban International’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also uses findings from Saunier’s work to identify and highlight salient charac…
Globalizing Responsibility
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns Fills a gap in research on the …
Consuming Ethics
Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existi…
Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement
This paper brings geographical research on urban policy mobility into conversation with historical research on the transnational municipal movement. It argues that much of conceptual and methodological interest can be found in this second literature, especially in Pierre-Yves Saunier’s research on the ‘Urban International’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also uses findings from Saunier’s work to identify and highlight salient charac…
Globalising the consumer
The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism
This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and et…
Detailing transnational lives of the middle
In recent years, writings on transnationalism have commendably repopulated a world stripped by globalisation theorists with institutions and capable individuals. But, in doing so, they have tended to focus on either end of the labour market, neglecting the middle, and to operate at altitude, neglecting the everyday intricacies of travelling and dwelling. Australia's working holiday programme enables young citizens of arrangement countries to holi…
Geographies and politics of localism
The Good Politician and Political Trust
There are three broad sets of qualities that citizens might expect politicians to display: competence, integrity and authenticity. To be authentic, a politician must be judged to be in touch with the lives and outlooks of ordinary people and previous research has suggested that this expectation has grown more prevalent in recent times. In this article, we use survey evidence from Britain – from citizens, parliamentarians and journalists – to expl…
The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom
This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study of Traidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in …
Free independent travellers? British working holiday makers in Australia
There is a renewed interest among geographers in tourism and how tourism makes the world and its people modern. In this paper, I engage with this renewed interest by way of a case study: British working holiday makers in Australia. Drawing on two modes of research practice, ethnography and political economy, I argue that, while working holidays may be structured in numerous ways, they also involve challenges, active individuals, heterogeneous spa…
Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism
There is a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among human geographers. There is also a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among urban policy practitioners. This latter "new comparative urbanism" is identified in the paper as "actually existing comparative urbanism" and outlined using existing literatures on municipal internationalism and urban policy mobilities, in addition to empirical material from a research project on interurban p…
The spaces and ethics of organic food
Globalising care? Town twinning in Britain since 1945
Fairtrade Urbanism? The Politics of Place Beyond Place in the Bristol Fairtrade City Campaign
Understandings of fairtrade, ethical trading and sustainability often assume a relationship involving disparate placeless consumers being stitched together with place-specific producers in developing world contexts. Using an ethnographic study of the policy-making and political processes of the Bristol Fairtrade City campaign, we suggest ways in which fairtrade consumption can become aligned with place. The campaign was a vehicle for enlisting th…
The Decline in Diffuse Support for National Politics
This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are confined to using either survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioral measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long view on political disaffection. We first consider time-series data available from repeated survey measur…
From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption
This article reviews some of the recent literature in geography and related disciplines on ethical consumerism and political consumption. Many geographers began their engagement with questions of ethics, politics, consumption and consumerism inspired by critical theory, commodity chain analysis and a sense that geographical knowledge might have a central role to play in progressive social change. Since these early engagements, it has been establi…
In what sense 'spaces of neoliberalism'? The new localism, the new politics of scale, and town twinning
Learning to be Global Citizens
The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other 'controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as …
Town Twinning in Cold-War Britain
This paper draws on correspondence and other material in the National Archives at Kew, London to provide an historical narrative of town twinning in Cold-War Britain. In doing so, it supplements a literature on town twinning that has little to say about international municipal partnerships involving British localities. It also supplements a literature on municipal internationalism that tends to focus on either municipal connections around the tur…
Geographies of politics and anti-politics
Four Modes of Neighbourhood Governance
In a context of global moves towards decentralization and neighbourhood governance, this article focuses on neighbourhood governance in Nanjing, China. We draw on interviews and observations in 32 neighbourhoods to examine how neighbourhood governance plays out in different neighbourhoods. We identify and describe four modes of governance-collective consumption, service privatization, civic provision and state-sponsored-to argue that neighbourhoo…
Changing spaces of political encounter and the rise of anti-politics
Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General Election diaries. Since diarists wrote mostly about politicians, political campaigns, and associate…
Mobility, fixity, agency
Recent writings on transnational corporeal mobility have been dominated by at least two concerns: mobility as ever‐expanding or even complete; and mobility as determined by economic restructuring. In this paper, I confront such writings with empirical material from primarily qualitative research into Australia's working holiday programme, which was established in 1975 to allow British citizens between the ages of 18 and 26 to work and holiday in …
Voter Decision-Making in a Context of Low Political Trust
Using volunteer writing for Mass Observation, we explore how British citizens decided whether to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum was the biggest decision made by the British electorate in decades, but involved limited voter analysis. Many citizens did not have strong views about EU membership in early 2016. The campaigns did not help to firm up their views, not least because so much information appeared to be in dispute. Voters, often character…
Beyond compliance
In the UK, discussion of good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic largely focused on compliance and non‐compliance with government rules. In this paper, we offer an alternative point of focus. Pandemic governance proceeded not only through rules/morality, but also through freedom/ethics. Good citizenship, therefore, involved practical reasoning in response to situations. We demonstrate this using diaries and other forms of writing collected …
The Good Politician
We explore the characteristics of politicians that make them trusted by citizens, fielding conjoint survey experiments in seven democracies. Studies regularly indicate that competence and integrity are key attributes in the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, but we show that displaying authenticity is also important. Authenticity is about being true to oneself, and in the political context this requires politicians to appear unlike typical…
Mobility, fixity, agency
Recent writings on transnational corporeal mobility have been dominated by at least two concerns: mobility as ever‐expanding or even complete; and mobility as determined by economic restructuring. In this paper, I confront such writings with empirical material from primarily qualitative research into Australia's working holiday programme, which was established in 1975 to allow British citizens between the ages of 18 and 26 to work and holiday in …
Free independent travellers? British working holiday makers in Australia
There is a renewed interest among geographers in tourism and how tourism makes the world and its people modern. In this paper, I engage with this renewed interest by way of a case study: British working holiday makers in Australia. Drawing on two modes of research practice, ethnography and political economy, I argue that, while working holidays may be structured in numerous ways, they also involve challenges, active individuals, heterogeneous spa…
Consuming Ethics
Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existi…
Detailing transnational lives of the middle
In recent years, writings on transnationalism have commendably repopulated a world stripped by globalisation theorists with institutions and capable individuals. But, in doing so, they have tended to focus on either end of the labour market, neglecting the middle, and to operate at altitude, neglecting the everyday intricacies of travelling and dwelling. Australia's working holiday programme enables young citizens of arrangement countries to holi…
Globalising the consumer
Fairtrade Urbanism? The Politics of Place Beyond Place in the Bristol Fairtrade City Campaign
Understandings of fairtrade, ethical trading and sustainability often assume a relationship involving disparate placeless consumers being stitched together with place-specific producers in developing world contexts. Using an ethnographic study of the policy-making and political processes of the Bristol Fairtrade City campaign, we suggest ways in which fairtrade consumption can become aligned with place. The campaign was a vehicle for enlisting th…
The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom
This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study of Traidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in …
The spaces and ethics of organic food
From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption
This article reviews some of the recent literature in geography and related disciplines on ethical consumerism and political consumption. Many geographers began their engagement with questions of ethics, politics, consumption and consumerism inspired by critical theory, commodity chain analysis and a sense that geographical knowledge might have a central role to play in progressive social change. Since these early engagements, it has been establi…
The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism
This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and et…
In what sense 'spaces of neoliberalism'? The new localism, the new politics of scale, and town twinning
Globalizing Responsibility
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns Fills a gap in research on the …
Town Twinning in Cold-War Britain
This paper draws on correspondence and other material in the National Archives at Kew, London to provide an historical narrative of town twinning in Cold-War Britain. In doing so, it supplements a literature on town twinning that has little to say about international municipal partnerships involving British localities. It also supplements a literature on municipal internationalism that tends to focus on either municipal connections around the tur…
Globalising care? Town twinning in Britain since 1945
The problem of choice in the logic of care
Learning to be Global Citizens
The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other 'controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as …
Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement
This paper brings geographical research on urban policy mobility into conversation with historical research on the transnational municipal movement. It argues that much of conceptual and methodological interest can be found in this second literature, especially in Pierre-Yves Saunier’s research on the ‘Urban International’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also uses findings from Saunier’s work to identify and highlight salient charac…
Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism
There is a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among human geographers. There is also a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among urban policy practitioners. This latter "new comparative urbanism" is identified in the paper as "actually existing comparative urbanism" and outlined using existing literatures on municipal internationalism and urban policy mobilities, in addition to empirical material from a research project on interurban p…
Locality and localism
This paper considers the political geography of localism and reviews the insights of geographers regarding localism and locality. It identifies three main approaches to locality in Human Geography. Regional geographers, humanistic geographers and spatial scientists view localities as relatively natural phenomena. Marxist and political-economic geographers view localities as social phenomena produced by uneven capitalist development. Post-structur…
Problematising practices
Authors' response to reviews of Globalising Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption (Wiley-Blackwell)
Geographies and politics of localism
Geographies of politics and anti-politics
Golden age, apathy or stealth? Democratic engagement in Britain, 1945–1950
This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and…
The Decline in Diffuse Support for National Politics
This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are confined to using either survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioral measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long view on political disaffection. We first consider time-series data available from repeated survey measur…
Changing spaces of political encounter and the rise of anti-politics
Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General Election diaries. Since diarists wrote mostly about politicians, political campaigns, and associate…
Sociology (34 obras) · Political science (33 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Politics (27 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Political economy (16 obras) · Social science (14 obras) · Economics (12 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Urban Planning and Governance (8 obras)